In a radio interview this month, an attorney representing Victor Marx said “a third party” unaffiliated with his campaign for Colorado governor was running a merchandise store that Marx had urged his backers to support financially.
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That attorney, Chris Murray, and the Republican candidate’s campaign have not returned messages over the past week seeking information about who is behind the shop. But a campaign finance report indicates it’s a limited liability company linked to Marx.
A promotional email from the store Wednesday included a disclaimer that it was funded by “Not Shook LLC,” a Wyoming company that was registered two weeks before Marx launched his campaign last year. The LLC’s owners are not included on its registration paperwork, but in late July, Marx’s campaign received a $5,000 contribution from the LLC for logo licensing.
The donation came from “Not Shook LLC — Victor Marx.” The address included in the contribution record is Marx’s campaign headquarters, which is also his nonprofit’s training center — and his former home — in Colorado Springs.
In a live video for his podcast Thursday evening, Marx, a former nonprofit ministry leader, denied that he was behind Not Shook, saying: “I don’t have anything to do with it, period.” He said the campaign finance filing was incorrect.
“Inadvertently, they put my name on the TRACER report,” Marx continued, referring to the state’s campaign finance reporting system. “We had to correct that. It’s being cured as we speak. I never caught it because I never looked at it. I didn’t know anything. But that’s the way it was entered. Again, it’s just another silly mistake.”
He said he has not received any financial benefits from the third-party vendor.
Marx’s campaign has refused to answer questions about the vendor since Murray described the arrangement last week, and the financial disclosure — together with the online store’s email — provides the only insight into who’s handling the campaign’s unusual merchandise arrangement.
Martha Tierney, a veteran campaign attorney who has worked for the Colorado Democratic Party, said she had never seen a state-level campaign outsource its merchandise to a third party.
“I have never seen it here,” she said. “And I’ve certainly never seen this kind of a setup, where the candidate appears to own the merchandise shop.”
Marx has boosted the website: On July 30, three days after Not Shook’s donation to the campaign, he told his wife in a streamed interview that supporters who already had contributed the maximum to his campaign should visit the store.
He previously acknowledged that the campaign errantly had accepted donations above what individuals were allowed to give under Colorado law. The individual maximum is $1,450.
The store, he suggested, offered another path for maxed-out supporters.
“If they order merchandise, there’s no limit on that. They can order as much as they want. That will really help us,” Marx told his wife in the interview. 9News was the first to report on Marx directing people to the site.
Under state campaign finance rules, LLCs that donate to candidate campaigns must identify an individual associated with the donation. Not Shook’s contribution to Marx’s campaign did not mention any other owners or company officers. Last year, the LLC was registered in Wyoming on the same day that Marx bought his campaign website domain name, according to campaign finance reports.
Murray did not return an email seeking comment Wednesday. The same day, Marx spokeswoman Rachael Flick directed The Denver Post to Murray’s radio interview. She did not respond to prior requests about the third-party vendor and declined to comment further in a follow-up email Thursday.
Marx’s Democratic opponent, Attorney General Phil Weiser, also runs a merchandise shop through his campaign website, and his financial reports include expenditures for running it. There’s also an outside merchandise store purporting to sell Weiser merchandise. A Weiser spokesman said Thursday that the shop was not affiliated with the campaign and that the campaign was unaware of it until asked by The Post.
Questions about where money goes
The Marx-promoting outside merch store, victor2026merch.com, sells items with Marx’s campaign logo as well as his books and his branded coffee. It was created July 7, according to online registration records. Marx officially won the GOP primary, which was a close race, two days later.
The website lists no information about who operates it or whether it financially supports Marx’s campaign.
It sells routine campaign merchandise — bumper stickers, hats, shirts — as well as pricey “bundles” of Marx gear that run up to $1,299 a pop. The most expensive bundle includes a “private group Zoom” call with Marx.
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The merchandising saga is the latest sideshow in which the Marx campaign has become embroiled in recent months. His campaign faces several campaign finance complaints and recently moved to refile nearly all of its financial reports.
He touted an endorsement that didn’t exist, expressed frustration at reporters’ ongoing focus on his difficult-to-verify personal history, and has struggled to pull in endorsements from other leading Republican figures. He joked in Loveland recently that other candidates didn’t want to appear in photos with him, according to the Colorado Sun.
In Murray’s interview last week with conservative radio host Jeff Hunt — a prominent Marx supporter — the campaign’s attorney said it had sold its merchandise in bulk to a third party for the same amount that the campaign paid for it. Murray indicated to Hunt that the outside entity was not affiliated with the campaign, and anyone purchasing things from it was not financially supporting Marx’s gubernatorial bid.
He said the merchandise was being sold for the price that the campaign paid to purchase it in the first place. The campaign has spent more than $63,000 on merchandise in total, according to campaign finance records.
Marx’s call for supporters to patronize the third-party merch shop spurred a campaign finance complaint that accused Marx of trying to get around individual donation limits. In an initial review, the secretary of state’s office wrote that the complaint alleged sufficient facts to support the complaint, and it gave Marx’s campaign until Friday to tell the state if it intended to fix the issues.
Tierney said it was unclear if the third-party setup violated state law. The state constitution prohibits people from acting as a “conduit” to funnel money into a campaign — but the definition of “conduit” does not include candidates and their immediate family members.
In any case, she said, the website appears to mislead voters.
“Are people being duped into thinking this is going to the campaign when it’s not — if in fact it’s not?” she said.
‘The material was sold at cost’
The campaign continues to operate its own “official” merch store, although Marx’s website prominently directs people to the third-party outlet.
Murray told Hunt that selling merchandise wasn’t worth the effort for the campaign.
“The benefit, the financial benefit, is going to the merch store owners and operators. They are not campaign contributions to the Victor Marx campaign,” Hunt summarized back to Murray. “And the material was sold at cost. So there was no financial benefit back to the Victor Marx campaign. The merch store buys all these T-shirts, sells them themselves. I think the bottom line, Chris Murray, is that this is not Victor Marx’s merch store right now.”
“Yeah, that’s correct,” Murray replied.
Marx’s daughter, Brie Marx, directed her Instagram followers to the third-party store in mid-July, in a post that included a favorable comment from Marx’s wife. A former Marx spokesman told Sky-Hi News in June that Brie Marx was handling the campaign’s merchandise sales. She’s received more than $22,000 from the campaign this year and is one of several people in Marx’s personal orbit who have been paid by the campaign.
The Post purchased a bumper sticker from the third-party merch store this month. It was shipped from a Colorado Springs address with a “Victor Marx for Governor” return label. The shipping address is a postal annex frequently used by a significant number of groups and businesses. Among them is another LLC established in Marx’s name and his wife’s publishing company.
The merchant store did not charge The Post any sales tax for the bumper sticker. While campaigns often don’t charge sales tax for merchandise, that’s because the purchase is packaged as a contribution to the campaign, Tierney said.
But such a distinction seemingly wouldn’t apply to a third-party merchandise vendor that is not collecting donations and is not affiliated with a political campaign.
Last September, the same month that Not Shook LLC was registered in Wyoming, an Instagram account was created under the same name. The account appears never to have posted anything to its page, although it did boost Marx and criticize his then-GOP primary opponents in comments on other accounts’ posts. The account also follows several Marx-affiliated accounts, including one dedicated to his dogs and accounts for Marx’s family, various supporters and campaign staffers.
Sometime between late Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon, the account’s name was changed. No one returned a Thursday direct message from a Post reporter, and by Thursday evening, the account was no longer visible.
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